Dream job 3: Lead programmer for a dot-com start-up

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Christopher Slowe

When was the last time you were on the internet? Perhaps you’re reading this online now. If not, the chances are you’ll have recently been browsing some kind of social networking site or news feed – and as lead programmer at Reddit.com, it’s Christopher Slowe’s task to make this easier for you. “My job is basically to help people waste time,” he says.

Reddit is a user-generated website where people post funny blogs, interesting news and photos. Other users then vote the posts up and down the homepage, resulting in a rolling list of the best stuff on the net. Past gems include the Reddit community helping a fellow user track down his birth mum, and forcing Greenpeace to name its whale “Mr Splashy Pants” rather than the more sedate “Neptune” in their name-a-whale competition.

Christopher maintains the site, which involves writing anti-spam programmes that detect when someone is trying to use the site to promote their own interests.

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These skills were honed far away from the glamour of a dot-com start-up, when Christopher was working in a physics lab at Harvard University, playing with atoms cooled to a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. “I started working at Reddit during the last year of my PhD, when I was a bit disgruntled with it all,” he says.

At this point, Reddit was still the pipe dream of a few guys throwing around ideas in their student flat. “I would work 10 hours a day in the lab and then spend the night doing Reddit stuff. I don’t know how I did it, but it was good to switch gears from fiddling around with lab equipment to fiddling around with HTML.”

His career path may have veered away from his original degree but that’s the nice thing about start-ups – they’re usually built around an idea that nobody has previously thought of. In these situations, past experience may not help, says Christopher. “What is needed most is insane determination to see something through when failure is a more likely result than success.”

What you need most is insane determination when failure is more likely than success

Now those days are long gone and Reddit attracts 5 million users a month, but how hard is it to get any work done on a site that is designed to be a time sink? “We’re all really motivated and abide by the mantra of drug dealers&colon; don’t take too much of your own stuff!”